


The 100 Rare Pairs Event 2018

by elle_stone



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Canon Compliant, Drabble Collection, F/F, F/M, M/M, Rare Pairings
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-16
Updated: 2018-07-16
Packaged: 2019-06-11 16:12:58
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 6
Words: 6,426
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15319260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elle_stone/pseuds/elle_stone
Summary: All of my ficlets for the 2018 Rare Pairs Event on tumblr. Some of these were too short to be worth posting alone so I'm collecting them all here. Each chapter is standalone.Table of Contents:I. Island, Miller/Jackson, canon-verseII. Embrace, Raven/Octavia, canon-verseIII. Escapist, Bellamy/Raven, Modern AUIV. Hardship, Miller/Bellamy, canon-verseV. Summer Scares, Jasper/Monty, Modern AUVI. Ice Skating AU, Jasper/Monty + Delinquents, Modern AU





	1. Island: Miller/Jackson

Someday they'll move back, back in time to the island where they first knew each other, really knew each other, underneath the outer layers, down to the skin. They'll travel through the shadow underground of the last six years, out into the light, up into the dun-colored landscape that stretches out and over everything they've known of the ground, through the sandstorms, the swirling windy wasteland—is this what they came for?

"You think it's destroyed?" Jackson asks. He's got his arms around Miller, draped over his chest from behind, and his nose and lips pressed up against the back of Miller's neck.

"Like everything else?" Miller holds Jackson's hands with his hands. Every point of contact becomes something he needs. He feels his own lungs, the way they're breathing in air, clear air: their most precious resource in the end. And it's always the end.

"Mmmm."

Feels the humming sound, buzzing there against his skin.

_Think it's destroyed?_

They could journey across the deadland, the ended land, persisting even through the end (and it's always the end, end of days) when everyone else has gone. What's left at last will be the cockroaches, the final survivors. That's why he keeps Jackson close: gotta be strong and resilient and just fucking stubborn and down in the dirt always, unceasing, for someone, gotta need something to live for. Gotta soften his own edges at night with his nose pressed up into some soft patch of skin. His favorite is the hollow of Jackson's collar bone because the first time, their first time, time-passing on the way to the apocalypse (end of the world coming, gotta keep moving, gotta GO) (clap one hand on his shoulder, let it linger, know he's still dazed), just after, when they were both still catching their breath, he let his head hang down and inched his nose into that space, felt sweat on skin, felt his whole self shrink down to fit that moment, small at last in the presence of that ending again. And a beginning, though he did not know it, at the time.

They could make the journey but where would they end up? More trashland, more interminable beige, a swirl of sand beneath that fucking sun? Sun he used to dream about, burning along his skin? He could have been a Guard, he could have been a farmer, he could have died in the underground—twice. It's all possible. It’s all been done. But the island never seemed entirely real; he used to stand on the shore, watch the gentle lap of waves up to his toes, the trembling blue, and think, _this is what it should have been like from the start_. This is the fantasy, sprouting up into life. This is the untouched past, our manifested Ark dreams.

Hard to believe it's succumbed to these endtimes, like everything else. Hard to believe it even could have.

"You think it's destroyed?" Jackson asks, and his nose presses up behind Miller's ear, and his lips kiss him there.

And: "No," he answers, turning his head, finding Jackson's lips and kissing him there. "I think it's out there still. I think it's waiting."


	2. Embrace: Raven/Octavia

When the foundation to the very first cabin was finished, the last of it at last, steady and solid and laid down safely into the earth, everyone cheered. Yelled and carried on. Danced. Hugs all around. Raven put her arms around so many people she lost track, but somewhere in that comforting crush of human bodies, each one held safe against her, and her arms around them in return, was Octavia. Octavia, the hug that lingered longest. What she’s decided since is that embrace was the start. If she celebrated anniversaries, she'd count it as theirs.

When she pulled away at last and looked at Octavia's face in the firelight, she saw an unexpected softness there, her real age around her eyes and in the expression of her lips. She saw sadness and exhaustion etched deep, and fear, and all of this like scars, having nothing at all to do with the day or the night, the celebration, their future. And she felt all of those same scars in herself. So she pulled Octavia close again, this time with her fingers crawling up to tangle in her hair, and Octavia's shoulders shaking and her arms around Raven fierce and strong, their bodies pressed together so close she could hardly breathe.

She wondered if she'd ever truly known Octavia before, or even truly saw her, and from the rush of that strange, maddening, tiring day, from the jumble of details that she later forgot, that question lingered, a thin little tune in her head. The _first_ around which she built her anniversary theory, her sense of beginning and of starting again. The foundation upon which she constructed their friendship: meals taken together sitting and staring at the skyline, their backs to the new houses growing up out of the ground behind, rising, not naturally, but built by human hands of human sweat and toil. Maybe the first true homes of their lives, those houses. More home than Mecha, now leaning into the lake, than Factory, in pieces against the rocks. It was easy to start everything again, knee bumping against knee, hand on knee, to ask the hard questions of each other, and the easy ones.

Sometimes they took walks in the fields and forests, and Octavia helped Raven over the fallen logs or down the steepest paths, and because no one was around, she accepted it. Days her leg still hurt, and she exhaled the bitter ache of it for the trees and the flowers to take in and transform.

Sometimes they did not talk at all, and that was fine, too. Sometimes they both needed the quiet. And it was okay. Okay to build up quietly, slowly, to form something new and still unknown and unknowable up and up and up out of the ground.


	3. Escapist: Bellamy/Raven

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This ficlet is a continuation of this scene: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12257070/chapters/27853383.

So he has decided to retreat. She sees that now. That’s how it is.

Raven turns on the desk lamp and lets its pool of sharp light fall over the bookcase, and runs her fingers over the spines, reading out the titles in her head like old rhythms and rhymes. The syllables mean nothing. Some of the books are new but most are old; worn; hardcovers with no dust jackets; he probably picked them up at library sales and used bookstores, and she pictures him: standing under an awning in the springlight, head bent, running his fingers slowly over the spines, in no hurry.

The room is dark except for the halo of light from the desk lamp; the rest of the house feels dark; outside it is long dark, and the blinds are closed. The room smells like paper and wood, like the windows haven’t been opened in a long time. Library smell.

When she met Bellamy, it was the end of summer, they were nineteen, and outside in the sun, and he was standing on a step stool, holding a megaphone to his lips. A wild boy then. Angry and strong. She was angry too and just looking for a cause, looking for the funnel to pour all her anger in, and he helped her find it. Even now she knows she bonded with him then in a way that can never be recreated, in a way that she could never bond with anybody else. That she will never love anyone else in quite the same way, or want anyone else, or be so infuriated and so admiring and so utterly charmed by or of anyone else.

She sits down at his desk, where every pen and paperclip is carefully arranged, and in the center he’s left sitting out a manuscript, perhaps complete, as if he was just waiting for her to arrive here and for it to be found. She flips through a few pages. Some escapist fantasy, like so many of the books, maybe all of the books, on the shelves. But can she blame him? Is not her own life a sort of escape?

By the time he shows up in the doorway, she’s moved on, staring at a framed watercolor of a shoreline he’s got hung up on the wall, her hands behind her back. “Hey,” he says, softly, and she turns.

“Hey. Everyone else asleep?”

Their little reunion. Funny how every time their group gets together, it’s like no time has passed at all. Like she’ll always know them at a certain age and in a certain era and this should be a burden to her, and yet, long after that perfect frozen time should have thawed it remains, as preserved as ever, despite the long passages of years. And Bellamy too, but with him, she is almost afraid. How easy it would be, now, to go backward, to fall into their perfect old patterns again.

“Everyone’s asleep,” he nods, and steps into the room. And she knows that she’ll be drawn to him again.


	4. Hardship: Miller/Bellamy

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: “What about millamy in season one - they're best friends and Miller comes out to Bellamy as gay. Bellamy comforts him and they end up cuddling/hooking up/whatever you're comfortable with?” requested by anonymous

They've been on the ground for a week, though it feels more like a year, when Miller pokes his head into Bellamy's tent, presents him with a pack of ratty old playing cards, and says, "I'll trade you some entertainment for a place to sleep tonight."

Bellamy looks at him, wary.

Miller holds the cards out, shakes them back and forth twice and raises his eyebrows, half-smile on his face. _Enticing offer, huh?_

And, at last, Bellamy sighs and nods and waves him in.

To his credit, he waits until he's dealt the first hand before he asks, "Why can't you sleep in your own tent?" (This, later, more than Miller's initial overture, more than Bellamy's nod, or the card game itself, stands out in Miller's mind as the foundation of their friendship: the delay in the question and how casual Bellamy sounded, as if the answer didn't actually matter at all. How he didn't make Miller feel like he was imposing in the least.)

He shrugs. "Let me put it this way. I _could_ sleep in my tent. But I don't need a front row seat on my roommate's sex life, you know?"

"Huh." Bellamy sets the rest of the cards down, and fans out his own hand in front of him. He looks at the cards, and not at Miller. "That's fair. I don't blame you."

He doesn't press the subject any further, and Miller's okay with letting it drop. Maybe Bellamy doesn't want either of them thinking of his own escapades: the girls he's had overnight in his own tent, the girls that don't stay over anymore because, maybe, he's taking this leadership thing more seriously now, because he's not just on Earth to dick around and grab up power where he can but—maybe--to accomplish something real. Because he's looking to grow some real respect, the sort not rooted in the thin soil of fear. Miller doesn't ask. But it's nice that even though sometimes he feels like he's the only person in this whole damned camp not hooking up with anyone, and not because he doesn't want to but because he's not ready to admit—not sure how it would go—and sometimes even more than that he feels like it’s so obvious, this accidental celibacy thing—still Bellamy doesn't pry into his personal life, doesn't bother with the past or poke at sore spots or seek out secrets—he just deals the cards.

Every night. It becomes an easy sort of routine.

"Where'd you get these anyway?" he does ask, once, the third or fourth time they sit down across from each other to play, betting for pine cones or broadly shaped leaves.

Miller shrugs one shoulder, then rearranges his cards, his tongue poking between his teeth. "I know a guy who knows a guy," he says. On the Ark that was code for _you'd be better off not knowing_ , and Bellamy's Factory, so he gets it. He even laughs, startled by that old echo of the past, and lets this subject slide out from underneath them, too.

*

Some nights they do talk, and some nights the talk is even serious: both of them staring down at the dirt-streaked faces of their Kings and Queens, sharing old stories about the Guard, overturning old bitter feelings: Miller talks about his father and the vast galaxies of space between them, and Bellamy admits that in his past life he was a janitor, even though the word, from the way he says it, must taste like bile on the back of his tongue. That was a long time ago. The Ark, still up there somewhere, listening for them, was a long time ago. Feels like a century gone by.

Sometimes, in their quiet moments, Miller starts to feel them: those first awkward feelings growing. _Yes, yes, okay_ , he says to himself. _Yes, all right_. Like trying to get a persistent little voice in his head to just _shut up_. He gets it. Obviously Bellamy is handsome and serious and thoughtful and weirdly funny at the oddest times. He has a way of speaking, even to crowds, that seems to zero in and then you just feel—he just feels—like he's the only one in the world that really matters and that—that can really fuck a guy up. So probably everyone in the camp has felt roughly like this. Special in the eyes of Bellamy Blake. Interested, a little, in Bellamy Blake.

So yes, sure, he has a bit of a crush. But it's not like it means anything. It's nothing.

*

Miller ties the cards together safely with a bit of spare twine and puts them back in the inside pocket of his jacket and as he does, Bellamy asks: "What about you?"

They'd been talking about people left behind on the Ark. A short conversation: Miller asked Bellamy if he had anyone special still up there in space and he'd snorted, hard and bitter, and said, "Not a soul.” And Miller had thought to himself: _right_. _Dumb question._

"Anyone special?" Bellamy adds. He sits back, his legs stretched out in front of him. He's taken off his boots and Miller finds himself staring at Bellamy's thick gray socks, hesitating at the entrance to the tent and just staring. Somehow he knows, without having to think it all the way through, that even though he was just about to head back to his own place, he's definitely not going anywhere now.

"I mean, my dad," he answers, and sits back down next to Bellamy on his cot. Bellamy nods and doesn't press but the silence does: this unspoken knowledge that there's more left to say; the implied, obnoxious comma at the end of his words.

"And I was seeing someone," he adds.

Sidelong glance at Bellamy. He's nodding again, patient.

"But we broke it off when I got arrested." No need to go into the details of it, or explain how Bryan would have waited, if Miller had asked him to. He had almost a year to sit in the Sky Box and maybe at the end of that he would have been floated, and that's too much to ask of someone, to hold that gnawing anxiety in his gut for all that time; he couldn’t stand it. He wanted to hold on, but he forced himself to let go.

"That's tough," Bellamy says. It comes off like a platitude, and he must know it, because he rolls his eyes up as if at himself, crosses and uncrosses his arms and then sits forward with his elbows on his knees. Then he keeps talking, as if, knowing he’s digging a hole, he figures he should be digging it deep. "Is that why you haven't hooked up with anyone down here? Still hung up on her?"

Miller's ready to make some sort of joke about how, _hey, that's awfully personal isn't it_ , but oh he wouldn't mind just letting it all out, just being fucking honest for once.

"No. No, if—I'm not interested in any of the girls down here. And Bryan, the ex, he's a guy."

And there: now it’s said. Now it’s out there. He’s handling it fine, except for the tense feeling that has suffused his chest, a tightness in his lungs that makes it hard to breathe. _Not exactly a graceful admission_ , he thinks, _but hey—you said it and he knows now; someone knows._ He stares down at his boots, waiting for Bellamy to say something.

What he goes with, finally, is, "I'm sorry. I shouldn't have assumed."

Miller could almost laugh. "That I'm straight? Why not? Most people are." Pretty much everyone, actually, is how it feels most of the time.

"Yeah, but." Bellamy exhales, slow, and sits up straight and lets his hands fall down on his knees, except that his knee is touching Miller's knee and so one hand misses, just barely misses like maybe it's an honest mistake, and lands on Miller's leg, and then just sits there. "Not everyone is."

If this is an admission too it's either very smooth or completely off the mark, too vague, too much like some generic commonplace, and meaningless. Miller's not sure. But he knows that the tension in his chest has traveled down the rest of him, so that his whole body seems to vibrate on some weird Earth frequency, and aside from that vibration, he's as solid and as stiff as stone. But Bellamy still hasn't moved his hand, so he takes his own, heavier than the globe itself, which sits suspended so easily against the backdrop of the stars, and sets it down on top of Bellamy's hand.

Bellamy's skin is warmer than he'd thought it would be.

"Hey, it's not like it's a problem," Miller says, cracking up the words through an ice age of silence. "I mean, I don't have a problem with it. And no one's ever given me shit." Then he shrugs up one shoulder, quirks up the corner of his mouth, and admits, "Worst thing is that every time I'm with a group of guys I have to listen to an unending list of stories about girls." He rolls his eyes. "It gets boring."

Bellamy takes his hand away— _aw heck, and here I was going to tell you my girlfriend troubles_ —and instead, without warning, sudden enough to give a guy a heart attack, wraps his arm around Miller's shoulders instead. Miller's whole body slides, like an avalanche, or a mudslide, like a massive crumbling of the earth, against Bellamy's side. This is the kind of gesture that exists easily in the spaces between friends and he knows it, yet, he still finds himself turning his head to the side, closing his eyes, pressing his nose against Bellamy's neck. Smelling his sweat. How odd, the skin of his nose touching the skin of Bellamy's neck.

"What a hardship," Bellamy says. It should be a joke, but it comes out a murmur.

"One of many," Miller answers, and turns into the embrace. He exhales and it’s shaky. Bellamy pulls him closer. And this, whatever it is, this passing of comfort, has so little to do with anything he’s said, with being gay, or admitting he’s gay, or with missing the Bryan or the Ark or his father, or with feeling mismatched in his own body, which he doesn’t, even, most of the time. It has to do with being stranded and alone and surrounded by a wall they built up themselves out of felled trees and scrap. It has to do with the ground, and with banishing uncertainty.

He holds on to Bellamy for a long time, and Bellamy doesn't let go.

 


	5. Summer Scares: Jasper/Monty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: “for the rare pair event, I'd love some jonty, maybe a movie theatre au in which one of the two works at a theatre, ooor a dog walking service thingy? (e.g. one is walking dogs and stumbles upon the other in the park) :)” requested by jasprjordamn ton tumblr (I went with the movie theater suggestion)

Jasper's seen him around school, had a couple classes with him and knows his name, but he doesn't truly get to know Monty Green until the July after their sophomore year, during the Annual Summer Scare Fest at the Palace Theater. Jasper is working the concession stand. Monty shows up with a group of boys, also recognizable from the halls of Arkadia High; they all order large popcorns with extra butter, but Monty asks for a package of Sno-Caps too. Sno-Caps are Jasper's favorite, and he doesn't even have to force a smile as he slides them across the countertop.

Monty's finished the popcorn, but he still has the unopened package of candy with him when he wanders out of Theater 3 and back into the lobby an hour later. The rest of the concessions staff are on break, and the next movie, the 11:00 p.m. showing of _Nightmare on Elm Street_ , doesn't start for another hour yet, so Jasper's the only one around. He's picking up random trash, wiping down countertops, cleaning up just to have something to do. The Palace is an old silent-movie-era theater, decorated in dark reds and with gilt light fixtures attached to the walls, plush carpet on the floor, but it's still populated by kids who let candy wrappers and bits of popcorn fall haphazardly in their wake, who leave sticky soda stains near the napkins and straws, so it's not like he's bored. Not like he has an excuse to be bored, at least. The lobby is low-lit, except for the bright florescence of the concession stand menu spilling out over Jasper's little island of junk food, and quiet in between rushes of new customers, and Jasper, expecting no one, jumps when he hears a sudden coughing sound behind him, signaling someone very and unaccountably close.

"Sorry," Monty says, when Jasper turns to him, eyes wide and body tense like he's about to exit right out of his skin. "I didn't mean to startle you."

"It's okay. You didn't," Jasper lies. He tosses the crumb-covered paper towel in his hands into the trash. "Um. Can I get you anything?"

"No, that's all right.,” Monty answers, but then he coughs again, and adds, "Maybe a water." He's leaning against the countertop, twirling his box of Sno-Caps around and around, like a spin-the-bottle bottle just looking for its mark.

Jasper fills a soda cup three-fourths full of water and slides it over, and then instead of going back to his busywork, he points to the candy and says, "No returns."

"What?"

"Your Sno-Caps. No returns. But if you want to gift them to me, I'll gladly take them off your hands."

Monty snatches the box up immediately and holds it up close to his chest, body half-twisted away, and answers, with an exaggerated, short, defensive flare, "Never. You'll have to pry them from my cold, dead hands."

"If you think I won't kill you for the best movie snack in the whole history of time, you're mistaken."

Monty sets the box down, but keeps it safely out of Jasper's reach, and motions to the small treasure-trove of identical Snow-Cap boxes displayed beneath the glass of the countertop. "Looks like you already have a lifetime's supply. No need to be so greedy."

Jasper makes a show of leaning over and looking at the neat collection of candies and then shrugs, and concedes, "I suppose you're right. They are all mine and no one else shall ever have them. So—if you're not here to divest yourself of the Sno-Caps...?"

"I just needed to get away," Monty answers. He gestures behind him, at the closed swinging doors that lead to Theater 3. "Have you ever seen _Friday the 13th_?"

"No, but I've heard it's a classic."

"It's terrible."

Monty says the word _terrible_ like it's the source of a horrid, vile taste in his mouth, and the pure, unadulterated disgust in it makes Jasper laugh.

"Seriously," Monty insists. "It's not scary. It's not even suspenseful, or gory. Just a lot of people screaming loudly while being semi-explicitly murdered in the woods. Oh, and having sex. I think it's popular because it's like 80s softcore porn."

"That just happens to be my favorite movie genre, so maybe I should check it out."

"Ha. Ha."

He's pretending he doesn't find the comment funny, but Jasper catches him smiling, just a little, just before he takes a long drink of water to hide it. Then he opens up the box of Sno-Caps, shakes a handful out in his palm, and offers them to Jasper. He takes one, and a second when Monty doesn't pull his hand away, and from that moment an unexpected softness spills: a softness of the sort Jasper cannot break with some dumb joke and so he doesn't speak, and the only sounds between them are the distant strains of movie-soundtrack wafting out from the theater behind them. The high shrieking notes that signal suspense. A faraway tinny shriek.

"It's a shame, though," Monty says, and Jasper looks up sharply. He'd been staring at Monty's hands, his fingertips curled around the paper cup.

"What is?"

"That you're wasting one spot on the Scare Fest schedule on _Friday the 13th_. I mean there are so many better movies that you could be showing. Not _you_ -you but—the Palace."

"Yeah, I guess. But," Jasper shrugs, and leans forward with his arms crossed on the countertop, "to be honest I never understood the Summer Scare Fest anyway. You'd think if they were going to marathon horror movies, they'd do it in the fall. Like for Halloween."

"Oh, no, this is much better," Monty answers. He sounds so insistent, not exactly ready for an argument but maybe for a speech, so excited and vibrant and utterly alive that Jasper feels a jolt of surprise so strong it all but drowns out that other jolt, that curiosity and wanting, that hits at the same time. Monty is so unexpectedly animated. And Jasper had only meant the comment as a stray thought, anyway, uncontroversial, hardly important at all.

"I mean, everyone does horror stuff at Halloween," Monty continues. "It's obvious. But horror is so much better in the summer. It's just a creepier time."

"Mmmmm," Jasper hums, and scrunches up his nose with a skeptical look. "You're going to have to explain that one to me. How does summer beat fall on the creepiness scale? Summer is fireworks and ice cream and the beach, and fall is chilly gusts of wind and early evenings and... I don't know, ghosts and stuff."

Monty pops another Sno-Cap in his mouth and answers, "Any time can be ghost-time, first of all," which, Jasper has to admit, is a fairly unbeatable argument. But before Jasper can come up with a rebuttal, or at least ask what his second point is, Monty glances around the lobby and asks, "Can you take a break soon?"

"Um. Probably. Once Monroe gets back, yeah." He looks up at the clock mounted on the wall behind Monty's head. "Should be any minute now. Why?" He's narrowed his eyes and is trying to look suspicious but Monty's smiling, expectant and pleased, so it's probably not working at all.

"Because I can explain it better outside."

Jasper still doesn't understand Monty's point, but soon Monroe shows up to tag him out of concession stand watch duty, and he's able to slide out from behind the counter and follow Monty out of the lobby, out through the front doors and past the ticket window, out onto the sidewalk and into the humid summer air, thick with rain and hot with coming thunder.

Monty tilts his head all the way back, and Jasper, following his movements carefully, does too.

The sky is dark and blotted with thick gray thunderclouds, no stars and no moon. As they watch, lightning crackles off in the distance. It has not yet started to rain, but Jasper can taste the storm with every breath; he feels it on his skin.

"It's like this," Monty says, but Jasper still doesn't understand.

"It's like this feeling right now," Monty continues. "This expectant feeling. Like anything can happen. Storms during the fall or the winter or the spring, they never feel quite like this. The air is so humid, it presses in on you and it's almost hard to breathe. Don't you just feel like there's something you can't see, hiding there just out of sight?"

They're out in the center of Main Street, not quite the middle of the night, most of the businesses shuttered at this hour but still the sense of people, of commerce, of life lingers. There's no danger here. Just a normal street, normal July night.

Yet still Jasper feels it, that unnamable thing Monty’s talking about: something very thin and very light snaking up the back of his neck, sending up chills on his skin, incongruous suspense-chills in the summer heat.

Another flash of lightning, and, a few heavy seconds later, a distant thunderous boom.

"I feel it," Jasper whispers.

And the sky opens up.

Monty grabs his hand and pulls him back against the building, safe in the shelter beneath the overhang of the marquee, and Jasper is glad for him, because without that palm grasping his palm he might have stayed right out there beneath the downpour and let himself get soaked to the skin.

"Okay," Jasper says. He looks at Monty, an uncertain figure in the sharp bright theater lights, framed by the storm-darkness behind him. “All right. I think I get what you mean."

He's not scared now but his heart's beating a few beats too fast against his throat, and he's still holding Monty's hand, and he doesn't want to let go. He's not scared. But he understands what _anything could happen_ means, and it's just that, right now, whatever that _anything_ happens to be, he feels strong and brave and ready, ready to welcome it.

Monty's shoulder bumps against his, and he asks, "Have you ever seen _Halloween_?"

The rain is loud, thundering down against the pavement just beyond their reach. "What?" Jasper asks. Monty leans in closer and his breath catches.

"I said, have you ever seen _Halloween_? That's a real classic. It's playing tomorrow. We should go."

"Yeah," Jasper yells back. "I mean, no, I haven't. But I want to. We should."

He squeezes Monty's hand and Monty squeezes back, and he's smiling. Another flash of lightning illuminates the street.

In this moment, anything could happen—and maybe someday, Jasper thinks, everything will.


	6. Ice Skating: Jasper/Monty

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the prompt: “Jonty + ice skating au? :)” requested by skaifayax on tumblr.

Monty has never been ice skating before, and Jasper has but not in years (but “It's just like riding a bike, Monty,” he insists, “it'll all come back!"), so they find themselves in a blind-leading-the-blind situation as they take their first few tentative steps out onto the ice. They're holding hands so hard their knuckles hurt. Monty keeps his other hand gripped around the guard rail, and Jasper waves his free arm out to the side, seeking balance.

"This is going to end in disaster," Octavia predicts, shaking her head. Her voice is pitched low but there's nothing mean in it, only fondness distorted by a very small, very slight smile. She's standing in her sockfeet just outside the perimeter of the rink, leaning over the glass wall that separates the ice from the resting area beyond, pretending she's not stalling as she waits for the rest of their group to put on their skates.

"Probably," Murphy agrees, from behind her, where he's pulling off his combat boots. "An eight-way disaster orgy."

Octavia snorts. He's not wrong. Except for Jasper and Monty, everyone else is loitering through the preliminaries, putting off the inevitable moment when they'll have to balance the fine blades of their skates on the cold, slippery sheen of the ice. Miller is at the skate rental counter, still, arguing about skate sizes. Her brother is taking his sweet time doing up his skates, tying and retying the knot as if he'd forgotten how laces even worked.

"Yeah, who's bright idea was this, anyway?" she calls out, loud but grinning, teasing, as Clarke and Raven step out onto the rink. She knows, of course: it was Clarke's. Clarke in her cheerleader mode: _come on guys, it'll be fun! Just like when we were kids, it'll be great!_

 _Just like when we were kids, falling down on our asses every five seconds?_ Miller had asked, and Raven had tilted back her shoulders and said:

_Speak for yourself._

It says something, nothing good but something, about them all that even though their collective skills are almost non-existent, they all agreed to spend a January Saturday at the Town Center rink, wobbling around on a slippery surface, finding their legs like newborn colts and huffing out little clouds of frigid air in the artificial indoor cool. The air in here is not like the deep-winter cold outside but more like a refrigerator chill, fake as the white walls and white beamed ceiling, a reproduction winterland around them—but at least they're not going skating on a real lake, iced over for the season, because with their luck at least one of their group would be bound to fall right in.

Only Clarke and Raven really know how to balance themselves on the ice, and even Clarke is a little uneasy on her feet the first few steps. But within a minute, she's gliding along with enviable ease, and as she passes by Octavia, she yells back: "Mine, and I stand by it. Come on, get out on the ice!"

And before Octavia can answer her, she's gone.

Raven experiences not even a moment of uncertainty, but immediately skates out to the center of the rink, turns herself around, and skates backward to Clarke again, where they link arms and fall into a rhythm together, bending easily into the far curve of the rink. They’re gliding so simply and so beautifully along that for a moment, watching them, Octavia almost tricks herself into thinking this will be easy.

Then she looks back over at Jasper and Monty again, and disabuses herself of that notion.

"This isn't so bad," Jasper says, as he manages his third awkward but decidedly upright sliding-step forward in a row. "I think I sort of have the rhythm of—woah!"

Too excited, his feet glide right out from under him, and Monty saves him only at the last moment from falling backward onto the ice.

"Yep, you're a pro," he answers. He has to contort his body into six different strange shapes in the space of fifteen seconds as he struggles to get Jasper to his feet without losing his balance himself. Because he needs both hands to lift Jasper up, he has to let go of his safety net, the guard rail, and he can honestly say this is the most nerve-wracking thing he's done in his life.

"Thanks." Jasper shoves himself off in the direction of the rail, hits it, and then holds on for dear life as he gets his balance again. They've skated out far enough from the entrance that most of their friends are just random figures, now spinning and flailing their way onto the ice, and though the rest of the rink is hardly deserted, it still feels very much like they're alone. "You know," he continues, voice pitched low, "I gotta say…this skating thing is actually incredibly exhausting."

Monty manages a short laugh—which sets him off balance again and has him reaching out once more for Jasper's hand—and wipes at the sweat forming on his brow with the back of his free wrist. "Yeah. Wish they wouldn't make the ice so damn slippery."

"That's what you should do next time you're bored. New invention: non-slippery ice. Easier to walk on."

"Sure. I think I'll call it 'the ground.'"

"Genius."

Jasper skates forward again, not quite daring yet to get more than an arm's flail away from the railing; Monty’s behind him, holding on to the back of his jacket with one hand. This will surely not end badly. They will be fine. They'll make a full circuit of the rink and then they'll collapse on one of the benches by the skate rental counter and never get up.

It's a great plan.

"Hey, if we're too tired to skate back the whole way, maybe we can get Raven to pull us back to the gate," Monty suggests, which is an even better plan, except that the thought of it, the image of them forming some sort of barely coherent conga line across the ice, Raven majestic and graceful in front, Jasper and Monty holding on behind, trailing in her wake and praying for their lives, is so hilarious that he laughs aloud at it, and laughing somehow sets his legs going off in all the wrong ways again, and this time as he grabs onto the railing to save himself, his feet head off in opposite directions all of their own accord, and he gets about three-quarters of the way into a split he is definitely not actually capable of completing before Monty hauls him back upright again.

“Thanks,” he manages, as he regains his sense of balance, slowly.

“Any time. That was a close one.”

“ _Too_ close.”

With considerable effort, Jasper flips himself around so he's facing in toward the center of the rink. Bellamy and Octavia are venturing carefully away from the safety of the railing, but it's only a matter of time before that plan heads south. Miller and Murphy are completely failing to keep up their usual stoic and consistently unfazed demeanors as their legs go off dancing this way and that beneath them. And Raven and Clarke—

Raven and Clarke are in the middle of the ice, curling around each other in perfect figure eight patterns, like they're trying out for the Olympics or something.

"Okay, maybe if we could do that," Monty says, "this would be more fun."

"Aww, you're not having fun?" Jasper asks, and it's kind of a joke, but kind of a serious question, too. Because, despite it all, despite being exhausted and sweaty and very slightly but truly afraid for his life, he is. Having fun. He slides, literally, a little closer, and wraps an arm around Monty's shoulders. They lean back against the side of the rink, and somehow gravity doesn't have it out for them this time, and they manage to find a good balance, right where they are.

Monty slips his arm around Jasper's waist.

"Okay,” he admits. “I'm having a little bit of fun.”

Jasper laughs, and gives Monty’s shoulder a squeeze. “That’s the spirit.”

**Author's Note:**

> All of these ficlets were originally posted to my [tumblr](http://kinetic-elaboration.tumblr.com/). 
> 
> Some will probably eventually be cross-posted to my ongoing drabble collection on AO3.
> 
> Thank you for reading!


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